One of the most impressive operations in a vehicle assembly plant involves the marriage of a vehicle body structure to its chassis. Commonly used methodology involves a substantial reliance upon manual intervention to accomplish this complex task. Automating this type of vehicle assembly process is highly desirable due to the labor intensive and physically demanding operations involved. Automation is complicated by factors like the stack-up of build tolerances that occurs as components are assembled together. In the case of body on frame vehicles including medium and heavy duty trucks, a number of unique frame assemblies with different rail spacing widths or different frame rail material properties may be employed for various GVW applications. A desire to marry the resulting variants to a common body design further complicates automation.
During the marriage process, body mounts are commonly manually aligned to enable assembly of the bolts that secure the body to the frame. Attempts at automation of the marriage process have been made by using means such as "post-piercing" of the assembled frame before marriage. This is somewhat of a limited solution since it is rather costly and is not universally employable, especially in vehicles with large ladder-type frames. Accordingly, advances in component design that facilitate marriage automation in a cost-effective manner are needed.